


the drowning instinct

by soundthebells (kosy)



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Developing Fear Avatar, Gen, Horror, The Buried - Freeform, Transcript Format, mortifying ordeal of writing first person pov, the magnus institute but american. that one, the ocean
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-28
Updated: 2020-08-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:07:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26154691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kosy/pseuds/soundthebells
Summary: Statement of Dee Montero regarding her, uh… near-drowning experiences in the Pacific Ocean throughout her life. Taken direct from subject on August 2nd, 2017. That alright?
Comments: 12
Kudos: 20





	the drowning instinct

**Author's Note:**

> [gestures vaguely] i haven't made content for tma in ages, but i had a statement/avatar idea out of nowhere, so i'm jumping on this particular bandwagon a few months late! thanks for reading and i hope you all enjoy.

[TAPE CLICKS ON.]

DEE

So… you wanted me to say my name for the recording? 

INTERVIEWER

Yes, we like to have an audio record of your introduction, just in case we lose the report you filed. So, Ms. Montero—just your full name, today’s date, and what your statement is regarding. 

DEE

Uh, okay. [SHUFFLES A LITTLE CLOSER TO THE MIC.] My name’s Dee Montero. I guess Brandee Montero for, like, the official record, but I’m trying to get that changed, ‘cause it’s a stupid name. Doesn’t even fit me. 

INTERVIEWER

Oh, by the way—sorry, I’m new here so I forgot to say it, but if you could refrain from editorializing in at least the intro? The statement is fine, but just for the introduction, we find it’s a lot easier if you stick to the official format: “Statement of x regarding y, taken direct from subject on insert-date-here.” 

DEE

Shit, sorry. You, uh, you’ll cut that beginning part out, right?

INTERVIEWER

Of course. 

DEE

Okay. Statement of Dee Montero regarding her, uh… near-drowning experiences in the Pacific Ocean throughout her life. Taken direct from subject on August 2nd, 2017. [PAUSE.] That alright? 

INTERVIEWER

[WARMLY.] That’s just fine. You can start anytime you like.

DEE

[DEEP BREATH.] Okay, I’ll—okay. I’ll give some background information, just so there’s context. Just so you understand where I’m coming from. 

I guess the first thing is this: you’d have to be stupid not to be afraid of the ocean. 

It’s just common sense, okay? I know that. I mean, I grew up by the ocean. Specifically in Orick, a little backwater town in Northern California a few miles’ drive from the shore. Oh, you haven’t heard of it? Yeah, you and the rest of the world. The main tourist attraction is the elk. There’s a lot of elk. And Paul’s World-Renowned Smoked Salmon Jerky. Still. It was home. And I’d go to the beach a lot on weekends and after school as a kid. The waves were always a little too rough for comfort, and everybody would get a whole cautionary monologue from their mothers, but that never stopped people, obviously. 

The warnings were pretty much what you’d expect—don’t turn your back on the ocean, don’t run off where I can’t see you, don’t try to rescue anybody who gets caught in a riptide ‘cause you’ll end up drowning too. Basic safety stuff. 

And everybody knew how to swim. You had to, you know? Grow up in a tsunami hazard zone or flood zone or whatever, you’d better know how to deal with it. Not that any of that ever happened, at least as long as I’ve been alive. 

Anyway, I’ve always been a good swimmer. Like, I’m not winning any medals, but I can tread water for a while and I’ve beat a few of my friends in races. So I know how to handle myself in the ocean, right? I was never terrified of it the way some of my friends were. It was weird with them. Almost a phobia. With me, it was just healthy respect. 

I figured—I don’t know. I think I figured it would protect me. It felt almost… owed? It’s stupid, I know, you don’t have to tell me. But it really felt like an unspoken mutual agreement. I mean, I _love_ the ocean. It feels safe the way—um, the way most places don’t for me, I guess. And whenever I went there, that felt… understood, somehow. _I_ felt understood. 

But like I said, you’d have to be stupid not to be afraid of the ocean. 

By all rights, I should have been more afraid than I was. I had more than my fair share of scary shit that—sorry, am I allowed to swear? I know this place is like… official and all that. And, um, I’m really not trying to sound dismissive when I say that. 

INTERVIEWER

This _is_ an academic institution, but we’re trying to preserve your story in your voice, so. By all means. 

DEE

Mm. Okay. Anyway, I had more than my fair share of scary shit happen to me when I was younger. When you’re a kid, that kind of thing sticks with you, right? It should’ve put me off of the ocean forever. Didn’t, though. Still not entirely sure why. 

There were tons of minor things, just your usual marine horror stories. The kind of anecdotes you tell at parties. But I think I was five when the first real thing happened? It’s one of my earliest memories, honestly, so it’s kinda fragmented, but my aunt, Ana, was visiting, and my mom took me and her to the beach for a walk. I ended up leaving them behind. 

See, Aunt Ana told me to find her a whole sand dollar to bring home with her, and if you grew up by the ocean, you know that’s kind of a rare thing—little pieces of them break off, usually, when they wash up on shore. If it’s whole, it’s usually still alive, and I always threw the live ones back. I think Mom and Ana really just wanted to catch up with each other, you know? We’d moved away from the rest of Mom’s family before I was even born. It made sense they’d want to talk without some little kid around. So I don’t blame them for not keeping too close of an eye on me. I just ran on ahead, pausing every now and then to examine the ground for shells. 

One minute I was crouched down on the cool dark sand to get a closer look at a bone-white pebble, the next everything was—not black, exactly. My eyes were still open. Everything was dark green and gray and swirling around me too fast to make any sense of it. It was sandy, too. All that grit in my mouth, my ears, my eyes. I must’ve gotten tumbled against the ground because I remember the feeling of the earth and water all around me, and the air was knocked out of my lungs. It battered me like it was alive too. Alive, and all-encompassing, and far stronger than me. 

It was a sneaker wave. That’s really the only explanation for it that makes sense. Massive wave that comes out of nowhere, absolutely no warning. When it hit, I tried to gasp in a breath on instinct. I think you can guess how that went. 

I don’t—I don’t know what happened after that. It just got darker and darker, and I kept not being able to breathe, and I felt myself going deeper—the pressure was building agonizingly in my skull, too much to bear. I probably should have been scared of dying, but. I think I was too young to know what death is. So I was just… calm. 

It’s funny how that goes when you’re a kid, terrified of the monsters in your closet but not of dying. You just can’t conceptualize a world without you in it. I miss that kind of certainty. 

My mom must have grabbed me or something. Pulled me out of the water. It took—actually, now that I think about it, I don’t know how long it took. I guess I couldn’t have gotten swept out that far if she got to me so easily. 

...I’d assume I just blocked it out, but it can’t have been _that_ traumatic because my mom didn’t seem too worried, and I don’t remember being injured at all. We just had to go home early ‘cause I was crying about my favorite shirt getting ruined by the mud. 

Anyways, that was the first time. You’re, um, I can tell by the way you’re looking at me that you think I’m wasting your time, but I promise it gets freakier, okay? Like, I wouldn’t hit up the Usher Foundation if I thought _literally_ anybody else would believe me. Uh, no offense. Sorry, that was rude of me.

INTERVIEWER

[STIFLING A SIGH.] No, it’s fine. I’m… well aware of our reputation. 

DEE

For real, though, I’m sorry. 

[AWKWARD PAUSE. THE INTERVIEWER CLEARS HER THROAT.]

Uh… yeah. Continuing on. The second time, I was sixteen, almost seventeen. It was the summer before my senior year of high school, and at that point I actually knew how to swim, and my memory is for sure more reliable. I mean, fair disclaimer, I’ve got ADHD, so hindsight is rarely _actually_ 20/20 for me because of how stuff slips through the cracks, but that’s more for, like, homework assignments and conversations than one of my literal near death experiences. And for what it’s worth, my memory of this one is crystal fucking clear. 

My friends and I went down to the beach basically every day that summer. It really was a—a golden era, honestly. Coming-of-age movie type shit, you know? Staying out after dark, getting wasted in someone’s childhood treehouse, spending days basically living out of the arcade that’d close down next summer. My parents were still strict about curfew—I had to be home by 11 PM each night, no excuses—but it was fine ‘cause pretty much all my friends had early curfews too, so it wasn’t like I was really missing out anything. We’d sneak out sometimes at night. Go swimming. 

The water was unreasonably cold by then, hours after sundown. Cold in the day too, honestly; the Pacific Northwest is like that. But it was a heat wave. D’you remember the California drought? 2006 to 2010, 2011 to… well, now. So it got viciously hot in the summer sometimes, hotter than it should ever be, hotter than the land there was meant to handle. It was the kind of heat nobody knew what to do with, used to the fog as we were. You can’t sleep when it’s hot like that. You can barely even breathe. 

Once, we planned a night out at the beach. We were all going to sneak out after our parents had gone to sleep and pile into Jess’ pickup and drive out to the cove a few miles outside town. Marco Ortiz got his older brother to buy him vodka from the convenience store down the street from his house, which was about as coordinated as it got for us. Like, we didn’t even have anything to mix it with, but we were soooo proud of ourselves for being that clever. 

It was sometime in July, I think, around midnight. There were frogs in the creek by our house and crickets chirping, and even though it was night, the memory has this sort of… golden tint to it, you know what I mean? That midsummer feeling. Anyway, I climbed out my window onto the roof and then shimmied down to the ground. I had to be extra careful; I knew my mom would kick my ass if she found out, and she has, like, supernatural hearing. 

The ride over was uneventful. Loud teenagers, you know? Not trying to be loud, obviously, but still loud. 

Oh, yeah, it was me, Benjamin Ethridge, Cass Whittaker, Marco Ortiz, and Jessie Landon, if you needed the full names for your… research stuff. You guys do follow-up, right? Cool. 

Before we started drinking or anything, we decided to go for a swim. I don’t know why. It seemed right at that particular moment. I remember Benji laughing, daring me to race him to the edge of the cove and back. It was—God, I know it’s stupid, but we were both super into Jess that summer? _Such_ elementary school stuff. We were always competitive anyway, the two of us, so having an incentive—well. 

“C’mon!” he’d shouted, tossing his jeans at Marco, who lunged to catch them and missed. “Just to the rock and back.” 

“You know I’ll win,” I told him, and he scoffed, but like, he was from _Idaho._ Jess’d had to teach him how to swim herself when he first moved out to Orick two years earlier. And he still kind of sucked at it. 

It was really no competition, so obviously I took him up on the challenge. I even gave him a ten-second head start. 

Naturally, our friends were idiots about it—all whooping, yelling insults, cheering us on. Marco took Ben’s side out of, I dunno, male solidarity, but everyone else was with me. I was laughing as I followed him into the water. It was, um. It was a really happy moment, even knowing what came after. 

Look, I know how it sounds. A bunch of kids hanging around an isolated ocean cove late at night with alcohol. I should have seen it coming. Or at least _something_ coming. It’s, like, the world’s kitschiest horror flick setup, but you’re never thinking about stuff like that in the moment. You aren’t thinking about your clichés and tropes and archetypes. You aren’t thinking about arc or dramatic irony. You have had countless other nights exactly like this where everything was fine. You’re not a nightmare in action. You’re just a kid in a place where you’re happy. 

So, yeah, as I swam out to the edge of the cove, I wasn’t considering riptides or leviathans or the depths below me. I was thinking about the developing muscle cramp in my thigh and winning Jess Landon’s undying love. Mistake number goddamn one, I guess. 

It was so innocuous at first. I turned my face to the left between strokes to take a breath, and the air was simply not there. 

My pace stuttered but I couldn’t just _stop;_ the last time I’d properly resurfaced Benji was three yards ahead, and I was still convinced it was just a fluke, somehow. That I’d angled myself deeper than I thought I had. But that couldn’t be right, could it? Because I’d felt the wind on my back only seconds earlier. I couldn’t have accidentally kicked out of range of the surface in that time alone. And yet there was no other explanation. 

I flailed my limbs out in all directions, hoping desperately to hit air or the pebbles below, but there was nothing but water and water and water. 

Panic set in then. I knew it was a death sentence, I knew the thing they drilled into your goddamn skull was always that you must not panic. Conserve your breath, figure out which way is up, and swim that way as fast as you can. 

But listen to me when I say this: I have spent most of my life in the ocean. I know about the depths. About drowning. About finding air again. I understand the water. 

In those waters, there was no _up._

It sounds like a—a nonsense thought, hysteria and nothing more, but I swear it was real. I knew it down to my bones. I opened my eyes, and there was _nothing:_ no shred of moonlight from above or below, no variance of shades in the darkness. I would have thought I was already dead were it not for my heartbeat in my ears and the bright horrible burn of my lungs. 

I struck out. I-I don’t know which way. I don’t think direction mattered to me at the time, I just—I didn’t want to die in stillness. I couldn’t allow myself to. It was blind and furious and stupid; for all I knew I was swimming parallel with the floor of the cove, progressing in neither direction, but I think even then I understood there was no floor anymore, just the gentle suffocation of the sea. Ignoring the pain, I think it might have even been peaceful. 

[PAUSE. SLOW BREATH IN.] 

Do you know about the drowning instinct? 

It’s human nature, the desperation to survive. I do believe we are innately good, or at least not innately evil. I believe that, mostly, we want to help each other. 

It’s just that when we’re drowning, _none_ of that matters. When we are drowning, we will grab at anything we possibly can. When we are drowning, we will hold onto whoever comes too close and we will either drag them down with us or use them to pull ourselves out. 

My fingers brushed skin. I was drowning. I held on. 

I don’t really remember what happened after that. 

I pieced it together later from what Marco, Jessie, and Cass told me. From the shore, they all lost sight of me and Benji at the same time. The water was black, they said, and eerily still. None of them moved or spoke for minutes on end. None of them could explain why. 

Then I broke the surface alone, lurched back to dry land, and collapsed on the shore. The world snapped back into place, and all at once they rushed forward and began talking. Put me in the back of the truck, sped back to town, and called 911. I was fine in the end, obviously. I’m here. 

They didn’t find so much as a trace of water in my lungs. They didn’t find Benji, either. 

[PAUSE.] 

INTERVIEWER

So, that’s it?

DEE

[SHORT, BITTER LAUGH.] Yeah. Guess so. 

INTERVIEWER

Thank you. But that was—what, two years ago? Why come to us now? 

DEE

I…. 

INTERVIEWER

Whatever it is, it’s alright. You can t—

DEE

—I keep going back. To the cove. 

[PAUSE.] 

INTERVIEWER

Why? 

DEE

I-I don’t know. People do weird shit because of trauma all the time, right? There’s nothing interesting about… 

I don’t do it often, okay? I only really started it recently. And I’m not looking for him or any shit like that. He’s gone, and if he’s not gone he’s dead and whatever’s left of him is tangled up in the seaweed somewhere. So it’s not some… quest to get him back, or whatever. It’s just… 

There’s this pull. To the ocean. Not even that cove specifically. Just—the waves. The stillness beneath them. 

When I was down there, choking on water. When the ocean was on my skin and in my lungs and behind my teeth. When I was drowning. 

I would give anything to be held like that again. 

So, yes. I keep going back. I keep diving deeper. I keep swimming for longer. I keep… hoping. That I will be pulled back down again. It hasn’t happened yet, but maybe—maybe if I just…. 

[SHUDDERING BREATH. THEN, WITH A SUDDEN INTENSITY:] 

You all know about this, right? You research people like me, with their horror story goddamn death wishes. You can _fix_ it. You can make the rest of it enough. Because it _is_ enough. I have family. I have friends. I have Jess. I’m not alone, and I’m not struggling, I’m just—

I’m afraid. And I don’t even know why. 

[PAUSE.]

INTERVIEWER

Ms. Montero, do you want to stop going down to the ocean at night? 

DEE

I don't think it cares what I want anymore. 

[RECORDING ENDS.] 

  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> thank you all for reading! i'm planning on hopefully doing more with dee in the future, but for now i leave you with this! you can find me on tumblr [@boneroutes](https://boneroutes.tumblr.com), and if you care to drop a kudos/comment it always makes my day. thanks again! <3


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